Afternoon all,

What is your take on a company work related stress policy.  We have around 1000 employess and I know we don't have a stress policy in place.  We have an employee who was signed off for work related stress, and I have been asked to produce a stress risk assessment.

Looking at the management standards, this is very much aimed at the level of the employer, to take reasonable means to ensure workplace stress risks are suitably identified and controlled (following the six management standards approach).

I can easily put together a risk assessment based on the 5 steps method, and ensure the recommendations from the occupational health dept. are implemented, however this is merely a reactive approach (closing the barn door after the horse has bolted so to speak).

Does anyone have any similar experiences of having to conduct a stress related RA, or implement a policy?

Cheers.

Better to have health and wellbeing policy which will cover all mental issues including stress. Having stricly stress policy can open can of worms as people can approach you with trivial things and consume all your time.

If employee aproach line manager about stress, they should be given risk assessment. This is completed by employee and discuss with line manager in first instance, to find solution how to reduce level of stress.

You can use IOSH stress risk assessment template.

Hi Jase,

I've used the HS toolkit before and found that it really did help get to the bottom of the issue. It's a very useful approach, but it's time consuming and has to be handled with care.

If using the 5 steps approach (which is simpler) you could incorporate the 6 workplace factors as well to come up with a shorter process, but I don't think you'd get quite the same insight as you would using the full toolkit,

Joh

Originally Posted by: chris.packham

Considering that each person will have their own tolerance for stress how will you assess the risk for each one within your workplace? How will you anticipate how a stressful situation will affect person A or person B, C, etc. and where will you set your acceptable limit? Then how, having done your assessment will you decide what is tolerable and introduce measures that will prevent such a stressful situation from arising?

As an example, someone has a heart attack. Obviously a stressful situation for those in the immediate vicinity. How will you assess the risk of this happening and what measures will you introduce to prevent those others being stressed?

Chris,

You raise some relevent points but give a poor example (IMO).

Apart from the obvious EFA measures that can be put in place to deal with such an incident. There is a well established system in place to risk assess those others involved that may be distressed as a result.

If you are interested search; 'Trauma Stress Management'  (TSM) and 'Trauma Risk Management' (TRiM)